We decided to really get adventurous and take off for another area of China that even Eric had never been to. If you happened to follow Heidi's blog while we were there in China, she shared some of this outing already. It was quite a difficult trip to get going. First of all, we missed our 7:15 am flight by 3 minutes but after much negotiating we were able to rebook on a later afternoon flight on the same day but that necessitated us getting back into 2 separate taxis and going back to Heidi's home for 6 or so hours. Then we discovered that all our passports and airplane tickets that Eric had been keeping in a plastic bag had been left on the top of the taxi when we got dropped off back at Heidi's house and when the taxi drove away half the passports fell out on the street in her compound. They were turned into the guard house at the front gate of the compound but we were perplexed (and scared) about where the other half were. After an hour of seaching every street in her neighborhood and offering tears and prayers, the taxi cab driver returned to hand us the other passports -- still in the plastic bag -- which had slide off the top of the taxi and lodged in the top of the trunk where he found them when he picked up his next fare. We were SO releaved and grateful. We got finally got off on this weekend outing but we were pretty much shaken up to the ninth degree and wondered if for some reason we shouldn't be going! We are really glad we decided to go ahead as planned.
We flew into Guilin which is almost to Hong Kong... a long ways from Beijing. It was about a 3 hour flight. We then took a shuttle another hour and a half out to a town called Yangshuo. It was 10:30 or 11 pm by the time we arrived at our hotel so we didn't see any scenery until the next morning. We were blown away when we saw these impressive mountains the next morning. This area is well known for these amazing mountains that just pop up off the otherwise flat land and are cone-shaped and covered in dense foilage. They are referred to as the Stone Forest. They are amazingly beautiful and breath taking. I have never seen anything like them.
This area is kind of like Jackson Hole, Wyoming or Moab, Utah only on steroids! Meaning lots of activities like rock climbing, river rafting, biking, hiking... lots of outdoors activities... lots of tourists (both Chinese and westerners) and lots of souvenior kind of shops as well as bars and discos playing loud music well into the night along pedestrian only streets.
For our first excursion we rented bikes in town and headed out to the remote countryside where we rode through rice paddies! How authentic China is that!!! About as authentic as it gets! Except for the hour we rode on bamboo rafts (I'll tell you about this later), we probably spent about 6 hours on the bikes and saw the more rural life up close and very personal!
This is just a typical day in the life of this woman --- out walking with her water buffalo. We saw lots of water buffalos this day. They are big animals and I was hoping I could pedal faster than they could run, if needs be! She was actually trying to tie a big red bow around the buffalo's neck and then I think it was her plan to try and get us to pay her to take a picture of her and her buffalo. The big guy was having nothing to do with than scheme and she was quite frustrated so we just snapped this photo and kept on biking. (Be sure to click on the photos and see the details in the backgrounds of each shot.)
